When Hypertext Markup Language (“HTML”)-based Internet web browsers were initially introduced, most Internet web pages were considered “static”. A static web page generally means that the associated web server will always respond to web page requests with the same set of HTML and associated web content, regardless of the user's identity or the retrieval context.
However, as the Internet has evolved, “dynamic” web pages are increasingly being created and deployed to create an interactive experience for the user. A dynamic web page generally means that content (e.g., data, text, images, form fields, etc.) on the web page can change in response to different contexts or conditions. Many dynamic web pages include multiple data tables and portlets that may be in the form of non-overlapping windows and that may each display data requested from disparate data sources, or that may each display data from the same data source but require separate data requests. For example, a single dynamic web page may include one data table that displays current inventory information that is retrieved from an organization's inventory database, and may include a portlet that displays weather reports from an external weather database.
Because data in some dynamic web pages may be received from disparate data sources or otherwise require separate data requests, the time to retrieve the data may vary. In the above example, the inventory data may be quickly retrievable but it may take much longer to retrieve the weather information. However, in a typical request for a dynamic web page, the web page is not displayed to a user on a browser until all the data has been fetched. Therefore, the generation and display of a web page can be substantially delayed depending on the time required to fetch the “slowest” data.